Hybridity fauna is only remarkable to the viewer, and utterly sensical to those in the ‘verse, offering a window into a world where Other’d groups do not live with their hybridity under scrutiny. Although they require addressing, I want to focus solely on in-show elements for the purpose of this paper. I do this with the caveat that the production of the series by an American company, its creation by two Anglo males, a voice acting cast and writing crew comprised mainly of white Americans working with a Korean animation crew has completely different implications for the concept I work with. Its concepts offer an insight into a process of becoming that complicates binaristic, linear patterns of thought. I am going to suggest that the universe of Avatar: The Last Airbender, inhabits this hyphen, this interval, in its self-contained logic, offering a perspective on approaching identity that refuses immutability and resists stability. In writing about the hyphen, Peter Feng notes that it “preserves the notion of a duality of a binary opposition, a pattern of thinking which limits the answers to those posed by the question.” Feng’s essay fights for the right of the space that the hyphen is supposed to represent to remain a space that is not a bridge between two concepts, but a space from which something new can be created in the meeting between them. Avatar: The Last Airbender has thus become a touchstone cartoon for its time as one that offers representation for Asian American audiences who grow up with marked faces, embedded in North American culture. With the acknowledgement of institutionalised racism, analysing media representation and considering what stories it has to offer its many myriad audiences becomes important. Yet it is in this age of globalization, in which information exchange is so widespread and accessible, that these systems of blending, assimilation, appropriation have become so visible. Mass migration is not new, nor is cultural exchange. This moment in the series was my starting point in considering how we often unthinkingly extend this understanding to something as fluid as concepts of culture and ethnicity. In world-building exercises, writers are encouraged to draw directly from their knowledge and experiences, to reconstitute it into something different. The puzzlement towards The Bear that has only one aspect is a source of humour to audiences who are familiar with systems in which we can definitively declare something with a single aspect. Sokka: Certainly you mean his skunk bear. Katara: The king is having a party at his palace tonight for his pet bear.
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